Yes, it's true. It hardly seems possible, but it's no longer looming off in the distance like an impending storm. The professional football season is finally here, under the guise of what is called the preseason games, shown exclusively Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, eight times on Saturday and 21 times on Sunday.
The preseason games are like a test, at least from what I gather. Those who survive, and by that I mean players who still have the physical stamina to crawl off the field and be able to attach an artificial anterior cruciate ligament to their knees, while also signing a contract for an amount rivaling the budget of a Third World country, will make the cut for the team. Pardon the pun. Well, there are also those players who will not have to hear the words, "Will the defendant please rise."
There are a lot of injuries in these preseason games, mostly in the locker room and parking lot. These will affect the outcome of not only the team for the season but also the coach's ability to continue his job with an aneurysm that has grown to the size of a goiter; you know, the kind you see on members of African tribes in the National Geographic magazine.
But the real action will be at home. In hundreds of households, men are now preparing for opening day. They are gathering supplies of food like a pack of jackals surrounding a fallen prey in anticipation of a midnight feast. Team shirts declaring the wearer to be an official National Football League quarterback will be worn until tiny molecules of atoms have no choice but to disintegrate into particles of dust.
Flags, comforters, pillows, hats, jackets and even products guaranteed to increase low testosterone are flying off the shelves. A man who's not prepared is ... well, he doesn't belong managing the team, even if it is from a BarcaLounger in a man cave in his basement, which is where most of the really important coaching occurs.
Oh, I know, you had a different idea of what Sundays would hold for you when you first got married. You thought you'd be out on a lake with your husband lazily rowing a canoe. It would be on one of those romantic days, where the sun is shining brightly, while you sit back in a sun hat and long dress. In between his strumming a guitar, you unpack the picnic lunch. Those were lovely dreams.
But seriously, once the season starts, the only light he will see is the screen reflection, which may burn those rods and cones, rendering a type of blindness. This blindness will be instantly cured if there are team cheerleaders in Daisy Duke shorts.
Not to be cruel, but let's face reality on your Sunday today. It seems to me that you more than likely have something akin to a dead rhinoceros sitting on your couch in the den, wearing athletic shoes, a warm-up suit and eating a drumstick that is the size of one you saw King Henry the Eighth waving around in a history book picture.
Football is a rite of passage for men, progressing from rolling old refrigerators down the side of a hiil as children to adults throwing water balloons out of the 10th-story windows of a hotel at conventions for air-traffic controllers or NORAD strategic planning scientists.
There is something about a sport where the participants have a close relationship with paramedics and EMT personnel that is off-putting for women. Not all of them; some women actually are quite astute about the game of football. But I think those are the women who also don't wear rollers to bed at night and pretty much wouldn't be caught dead in a pair of tube socks. I don't know how they do it.
You can forget the HGTV décor, it's taking one for the team time – or not.
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Nancy Katz has a degree in creative writing and is the author of the book, "Notes from the Beach." She has written the column Around Town for the Cape Gazette for twenty years. Her style is satirical and deals with all aspects of living in a resort area on Delmarva.
